THE STANDARD: A Dani Reyes Legal Thriller

The form that was going to kill Hollis Ward had a satisfaction survey stapled to the back of it. A year ago, defense attorney Dani Reyes exposed a secret that was quietly killing the people no one would miss. She won. So they did the one thing she never planned for. They made it legal. Now the killing has a name - the Continuity of Care Standard - and a federal contract, and a public face. It scores you. If your number falls below the line, the state routes you, with dignity and transparency and a right of appeal, toward a death it has already predicted. The rates are published. The votes are on the record. There is nothing to expose, because nothing is hidden. But Hollis Ward's score didn't fall. Somebody pushed it. Buried inside the "neutral, sealed" machine is a hand - a quiet way to move a safe person across the line and erase the fingerprints. The math kills the expensive. The hand kills the inconvenient: the witnesses, the threads, anyone who could burn the whole thing down. And the trail runs straight up into the office of the man the country is about to thank - Gideon Vance, architect of the standard, author of a bestseller about the courage to count, a sincere and grieving reformer who swears on his life that no such hand exists. To prove he's lying, Dani will need a dying whistleblower, a forgotten eyewitness, a document scheduled to be legally destroyed in six days, and a way to make the most powerful man in the apparatus choose, live and on camera, between an argument and a life. She can't repeal a river. She can only stand in it. THE STANDARD is the sixth Dani Reyes legal thriller - a relentless, emotionally devastating story about conscience, arithmetic, and the price of refusing to look away. For readers who like their courtroom suspense with teeth and their heroes outgunned.

Pagina's: 261, Paperback, Independently published